Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Lovely Ladies

It was a beautiful, clear - if not bitterly cold - Sunday in Golden Gate Park and it was hard not to be struck by the beauty, the activity, and the vibrance of life in the city... farmer's markets and street musicians, coffee shops and bakeries with lines out the door, steam or fog rising from a botanical garden, children running through it... and then inside the Hall of Flowers it smelled just like an old library book and there was this tangible evidence of other vibrant lives, in other places, in other times. I bought mostly postcards because they are small and inexpensive and because they are interesting. I found myself feeling glad that they hadn't been thrown out with the trash.

At $0.25 or a dollar per card, I bought anything (but not everything) I found inspiring in some way. Sometimes I bought something for what was written on the backside. Sometimes for the different phrasings of greetings from olden times. Sometimes for the humor, or beauty, or general weirdness. I was drawn mostly to the Victorian and the art deco.

One of my finds at the vintage paper fair, which seemed somewhat unusual, was this postcard of a typesetting room in another part of the world, a long time ago. This is very tedious work!

I'm not going to post everything I bought, and not all at once, but here are some lovely ladies I seem to have collected:

I don't normally accumulate postcards unless someone sends me one, so this is kind of new to me... but, yes, sometimes they go on the wall, and otherwise they're nearby, in a box or envelope. Because of their age I don't want to affix them to a sketchbook or anything - the ones that are meant to inspire letterpress work. after going just twice, you do start to see some of the same things over and over, so I don't think I'll get too crazy with it, but the thing I kind of like best are the boxes of old photos, which are a little more expensive to buy. I like looking for strange ones and keeping those. I'd like to have a little online gallery of found photos or something maybe.